'Whitey' writes back to Quincy native

Author and Quincy native Alison McLennan didn’t expect to get a reply when she wrote to once-fugitive mob boss and accused murderer 'Whitey' Bulger. But she did.

Lane Lambert

It’s not easy to follow James “Whitey” Bulger’s trial from 2,400 miles away, but Quincy native, author and Utah resident Alison McLennan is trying. She has reasons. Her new novel was inspired by the Bulger saga – and she’s among the few people who got a letter from the accused murderer after he was caught and charged.

In September 2011 – three months after the FBI arrested the fugitive mob boss and his girlfriend Catherine Greig – McLennan was finishing “Falling for Johnny” (Twisted Roots Publishing), which features a character inspired by Bulger. She’d spent years researching his crime career, and she wanted him to know that she’d “borrowed his life,” as she put it.

So she mailed a letter to the Plymouth County jail – and to her surprise, he wrote back.

Signed, “Sincerely, Jim Bulger,” the letter turned out to be a preview of Bulger’s apparent trial strategy – maintaining that he wasn’t really an FBI informant, and that he wasn’t involved in the murders of two female victims, Debra Davis and Deborah Hussey, McLennan said.

“In his psyche, whatever judgment on him the (jury) passes, he has a lot of honor,” McLennan said of the letter. “Whether it’s the truth or he’s spinning his image, it doesn’t matter.”

Bulger and Greig were still on the lam when McLennan started working on the novel in 2008. Her research ranged from biographies and crime books to interviews with former Boston bookies and audio tapes of Bulger the FBI made public in 2010. But her brushes with Bulger’s world go back years earlier.

She once lived on Bayshore Drive near Wollaston Beach, not far from Bulger and Greig’s Louisburg Square South condo. When she was a youngster her father rented a house in Squantum, not far from where Greig lived before she went on the run with Bulger in 1995.

Now 42, she’s a North Quincy High School graduate. She moved west, got a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah and later returned to Boston, for a master of fine arts degree at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill.

At Pine Manor she had the Dennis Lehane Fellowship for fiction writing. The fellowship is named for the Boston novelist who’s best known as the author of “Mystic River.”

McLennan said her fictional character Johnny “Camel” McPherson is based more on Bulger’s persona than the facts of his criminal history. McPherson shares Bulger’s obsession with fitness, as well as his readiness for violence.

Unlike the late actor James Gandolfini’s TV gangster character Tony Soprano, neither Whitey nor Camel sought out a psychotherapist. But McPherson becomes an FBI informant.

“Listening to the FBI tapes was almost like (studying) method acting,” she said, referring to recordings the FBI made public in 2010.

Her young female protagonist Riley Donovan’s fictional association with McPherson evokes the beginning of Bulger’s relationship with Greig, but McLennan said Riley’s character is mostly inspired by her own teenage years, not Greig’s early life.

“She (Greig) had already been in this world,” McLennan said of the South Boston that Bulger once controlled.

Lane Lambert may be reached at llambert@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @LLambert_Ledger.